I just discovered a use for a retired husband!!! Our local growers association often shares their excess of odd things. Today I learned that the apple cider producer has lots of apple mash. I just sent Hubby off with the truck to shovel up a truckload of the stuff for me. I’m so excited about a pick-up load of compost material! I have visions of Hubby shoveling and hauling more free stuff for my gardens. Come to think of it, Hubby’s ability to shovel farm products is why I married the man. As a teen, he worked on a dairy farm shoveling the fertilizer that fell from the cows. Farm boys have the best bodies ever, and they don’t need to workout in a gym. Sigh. Anyway, I looked at his body and thought that he could get some real garden work done. I’ve been sorely disappointed in the amount of yard work Hubby does. He hates it. I didn’t know that before we got married, because he told me he liked working with the cows. Anyway, he preferred being a tax accountant to gardening. I admit that a resident tax accountant is a handy thing to have. However, even getting him to ride the lawnmower around the lawn is a challenge. I’m afraid Hubby has more digging coming up. I have over a thousand new bulbs to be planted this fall. He will have to dig out weeds, haul dirt and dig trenches for the bulbs. When I told Hubby about digging the trenches, he suggested that I get our road and land-clearing contractor to dig a couple nice long trenches with his big $450/hour road-building and tree eating machine. I think not. It would eat up too much of my profit to hire someone to dig trenches. I do have some help digging in the garden. I intend to spread that apple mash over where I want to make new beds and let the earth worms work it into the soil. Earth worms are wonderful garden helpers. They are not particularly sexy or ornamental like Hubby, but unlike Hubby they get the job done without whining. Given the arthritic condition of my body, I’ve started finding gentler ways to garden. I try to smother weeds with cardboard and paper. Paths are now big enough for the riding mower. Usually I sheet compost right on my raised beds. Including Hubby in my little garden projects saves my body from serious damage. For example: I let Hubby shovel out the bedding from the duck pen. We put the duck-yard litter on empty beds and the compost pile this time of year. I will transplant the kale over duck yard litter. The high nitrogen content keeps the kale from freezing and discourages the nematodes that like to eat Kale roots. I’ll need to transplant the Kale, because it seeded itself in the future onion bed, instead of where I want it for winter. I let my kale reseed itself wherever it wants, which saves me a great deal of trouble. The composting, and spreading straw, paper, and apple littler all work together to make the spring planting easier. Hubby really is essential to the garden, because to build a new bed, I layer paper and cardboard, with duck yard bedding, spent dirt, and garden clippings into what I call a lasagna bed. I can plant directly into this mix of rotting material. Six months after I build a new lasagna bed, the earthworms and microbes have turned the waste into beautiful fluffy topsoil. Since we have arsenic in our soil, gardening above the toxic dirt is preferred and is essential for growing food items. Despite the work of the resident earthworms, I still need Hubby to haul material for the beds.

In my book M’TK Sewer Rat, one of the events that drives the action is a purge. Obeying the emperor’s order, the army came through the city and burned a whole borough. At other times in my back story, the oligarchs ordered their private armies to kill whole villages or all of another family. Of course we don’t have purges here in the US. We never… well there was that whole business with the native population. However, we don’t have modern day purges. I wonder. I wonder what goes on in the boardrooms of Dow, Dupont, Bayer, Koch Industries, or Monsanto. Have they ever had a conversation, “Sir, we discontinued the experiment because all the baby rats died, or we’ve reviewed the study behind the claims and it is sound.” Then, someone makes the decision to continue to produce their product saying, “The world has too many people anyway, we won’t discontinue this product until we are forced to.” Now, if I had not been involved in the research and advocacy on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), I might be able to believe that an industry would not continue to produce a product without warning about it’s effect on the developing fetus or on young children. But, I did work on FAS advocacy and lobbied our legislature to provide services for children with alcohol related disabilities. I also watched my boss get shoved into a wall by the liquor lobbyists. I got stepped on so hard my foot got bruised. With my background, I can easily imagine the decision-making process when the chemical companies where faced with public knowledge that their products in children’s clothing cause ADD and Autism. I can imagine they looked at what portion of their profits come from chemicals in children’s clothing and made the decisions to stonewall as long as they could. They certainly seemed to have directed their bought-and-paid-for Washington State senators to block all efforts to make children’s clothing healthier by removing the harmful chemicals. What do you call it when a company makes the decision to cause one in fifty children to have a debilitating disability? I call it morally bankrupt. Is it a purge? Or a scourge? It amazes me that while mothers where terrified that their children might get Ebola, they were also dressing them in flame retardant pajamas and sending them off to bed to develop ADD or Autism. This level of disinformation strikes me as massively criminal and irresponsible on the part of our fourth estate. Last year, a new book came out telling women that it is okay to drink socially while pregnant. The claims in the book did not match the credible research. The author looked at bogus research that does not measure damage due to prenatal alcohol exposure. Yet, this irresponsible book got published while those of us who have worked with genuine research cannot get a big publisher to take our work on FAS. Where do these decisions come from? Did the publishers accept this sloppy irresponsible work because they thought they could make a profit? They certainly had no respect for the truth or the lives that would be damaged through the misinformation they published. So we have many substances in our country that can kill or cause damage when used correctly and legally. The government, that is supposed to protect the population from the greed of the few, protects the few and makes the conscious decision to maim and kill a certain portion of our population. What do we call this behavior where profits come before human life? Do these decisions constitute a purge? How many times does a decision maker look at the data vs profit equation and dismiss the health of the population by saying, “The world has too many people all ready. It won’t hurt to lose a few, or one in fifty.”

After Aunt Charlotte came to stay with us, she kept me busy fetching and carrying. I think she just made up things for me to do. “Rosemary, get my knitting bag from my room.” “Rosemary put the napkins and tablecloth in the laundry.” Marissa never had to run errands because Aunt Charlotte had declared her to be a prodigy on the piano, so Marissa needed to spend all her energy practicing. She’d declared Caroline to be too delicate for running up and down stairs. “She has such delicate bones.” No, I was sturdy, so I ran errands. I fetched and carried for Aunt Charlotte for almost two weeks before she interrupted a particularly nice daydream I was having about me being chosen as a princess in the May Queen’s court for the May Day Festival. Every year, Mom took me to see my brother, Devon and my sisters in the May Day Festival. All the princesses got to wear pretty pastel dresses, while the rest of their classmates wore costumes to represent spring. Ever since I could remember, I knew I didn’t want to be one of the pansies that always wound the May Pole, or, worse, one of the dancing birds. I’d wanted to be a May Day Princess. I’d just got to the part in my daydream where the principal announced the names of all the May Festival princesses at our Friday assembly. He called my name, and my friends clapped and cheered as I walked to the front of the gym, where we had assemblies. Aunt Charlotte’s voice interrupted me just as I saw the look of adoration of Freddy’s face. “Rosemary, run downstairs and tell Devon it is time for him to do his homework.” I wanted to savor that look of adoration from Freddy. I wanted the whole school to see me walk to the front of the gym. I did not want to run to the basement, and I most certainly did not want to tell Devon anything, especially something he didn’t want to hear. I burst into tears over the loss of my daydream. Mom declared, “She’s tired.” Aunt Charlotte countered, “Little legs don’t get tired. Maybe she is coming down with something. Why is she under the piano anyway?” I always lay on the floor under the piano. I claimed this as my spot in the house. Nobody had ever questioned my spot or tried to take it away form me. I cried harder. Aunt Charlotte sounded scandalized, “My goodness. I’ve never heard such a racket.” I thought she should get used to it, if she was going to stay at our house. Mom demanded, “Rosie, come out of there, right now, and go to bed. If you are going to cry like that, you need to be in bed.” Going to bed sounded just fine with me. I had books to read and a tablet for drawing tucked under my bed. I could finish my daydream, and maybe Freddy would ask to hold my hand and walk with me to class and push me in the swings at recess. Before school the next day, Aunt Charlotte checked me for a cough and took my temperature. I seemed to be fine, but she made me swallow a big spoon of Milk of Magnesia anyway. Every day at ten, my teacher, Mrs. White took Ann, Freddy and me aside and let us read. I wasn’t as good as Ann, but Mrs. White helped me figure out the words. After school this day, she gave me three books to read at home. After dinner, I took my books under the piano and started to make out the words. After a while, Aunt Charlotte looked around, “Where’s Rosemary? I want my sweater.” Devon sneered, Devon couldn’t talk without sneering, “She’s under the piano, again.” “Rosemary, what are you doing under there? Come out and get my sweater.” I crawled out and ran to fetch Aunt Charlotte’s sweater while still thinking about my book. I liked the pictures and the words were mostly easy for me. I handed Aunt Charlotte her sweater and went back to the piano. “Rosemary, what are you doing under there?” Aunt Charlotte seemed determined to interrupt my reading. “Homework.” “No she isn’t! Kindergarteners don’t get homework. She’s lying again.” Devon always accused me of lying no matter what I said. “Rosemary, bring me what you have under there.” Aunt Charlotte held out her hand, so I gathered up my three books and took them to her. She looked them over then opened them up and read inside the front covers and the back covers. “Where did you get these?” “Mrs. White gave them to me. She gives everybody in my reading group books to take home and read.” “She’s lying. We never had homework when I was in Kindergarten.” Devon sneered. “Rosemary, come sit next to me.” Aunt Charlotte patted the place next to her and opened one of the books. “Now, read this to me.”

I had already made out all the words in the book she opened, so I read them quite easily. When I finished, Aunt Charlotte closed the book and surprised me. “Devon, you are right. Kindergarten children don’t get homework. However, Rosemary is a prodigy. She reads far better than other children her age. She must be encouraged.” Being a prodigy sounded hopeful, and life did improve. Aunt Charlotte took me to the library after school the next day and found more books for me to read. She sat with me and helped me read the same as she helped Marissa with her piano practicing. As I had hoped, prodigies do not fetch and carry. Even better than getting out of tons of chores was that Devon had to do those chores because Marissa and I were prodigies, and Caroline was still delicate.